Munyaradzi Mushonga (PhD) is an African interdisciplinary scholar with a decolonial theoretical and activist orientation. He is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS) at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa. He is the immediate past Programme Director for Africa Studies at UFS and was a member of the Decolonization Engagement Group of Senate at the University of the Free State. Before joining UFS, he taught history, environmental history, and culture & heritage studies at the University of Zimbabwe and at the National University of Lesotho. He currently teaches and supervises in the Africa and Gender Studies programmes at honours, masters, and PhD levels. Prof Mushonga`s areas of expertise and interest include postcolonial/decolonial theory, gender, orality, higher education (university) and the politics of knowledge production and dissemination. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who boasts over 30 years of teaching, learning and research experience. He has conducted fieldwork and archival research in four different countries – Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He is one of the editors of Migration, Borders, and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities (Lexington Books: New York. 2024). He has participated in numerous research grant projects, the most recent being Unsettling Paradigms: The Decolonial Turn in the Humanities funded by the Mellon Foundation, and The Lesotho-South Africa Border(lands) project funded by the National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS). Prof Mushonga strongly believes that another knowledge and another world civilisation is possible. His decolonial scholarship and activism are underpinned by the question: what are the things that we cannot know because of what we know? He deploys this question to relearn what Western modernity taught him to despise. He enjoys operating at the margins where he tries, in typical Hartmanian approach, to bend time in order to render past, present and the future coterminous. Prof Mushonga`s engaged scholarship includes serving as the Head of the Research and Development portfolio of the Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA); as a member of OHASA`s Editorial Board; and as the Global Academic Director for the Decolonial International Network (DIN) https://din.today/, among other portfolios. 

Recent 

• Mushonga, M. 2025. `The resilient epistemic empire and neoliberal constructions of higher education and the university: a case study of the National University of Lesotho`. In E. T. Woldegiorgis, L. V. Govender & D. Z. Atibuni, (eds). Higher Education Transformation in Africa: A Quest for Epistemological Rupture. Routledge: London. 2025, pp.177-197 
• Mushonga, M, et al (eds.) 2024. Migration, Borders, and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities (Lexington Publishers: New York).
• Mushonga, M., et al.,2024. Migration, Borders, and Borderlands in Southern Africa in Historical Perspective. In Mushonga, M, et al (eds.). Migration, Borders, and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities (Lexington Publishers: New York).
• Mushonga, M. & Cawood, S. 2024. ‘You Have to Pay With Your Body’: The Precarity of Subaltern Basotho Migrant Women Within the Lesotho-South Africa Border(land)s. In Mushonga, M, et al (eds.). Migration, Borders, and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities (Lexington Books: New York).
• Leshota, P. & Mushonga, M. 2023. Subverting the hegemony of Western ‘theological’ and cultural domination: King Moshoeshoe I and ‘hidden transcripts’ of resistance, Critical African Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2023.2208688.
• Aerni-Flessner, J., Twala, C., Mushonga, M. & Magaiza, G. 2022. A transnational history of stock theft on the Lesotho-South Africa border, 19th to the present, South African Historical Journal, 73(4): 903-926. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2022.2052171.
• Mushonga, M. & Hudson, H. 2020. Power and Resistance: Struggles over Organisational Transformation and Restructuring at the National University of Lesotho in the 21st Century, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46(4), pp.655-672. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2020.1794391.
• Mushonga, M. & Seloma, T. M. 2018. Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: QwaQwa Women’s Experiences of the Apartheid and Post-apartheid Eras, Journal for Contemporary History, 43(1), pp. 196-214. https://doi.org/10.18820/24150509/JCH43.v1.10
• Mushonga, M. 2013. White Power, White Desire: Miscegenation in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), African Journal of History and Culture, 5(1), pp. 1-12.
• Mushonga, M. 2013. Names more Lasting than Bronze: The Politics of the Immortalisation and Mythologisation of White Settler Achievements in Southern Africa, The Dyke: A Journal of the Midlands State University, 7(3), pp.35-55.

Forthcoming

• Mushonga, M. & Thabane, M. 2025. Methodologies and ethics in oral historical research in Southern Africa: Case Studies from Lesotho and South Africa. In Oral history in South Africa: Autoethnography, Methodologies and Ethics, (AOSIS Press).

• Kamwendo, J. & Mushonga, M. 2025. The intersection between Chichewa and Shona proverbs and patriarchy: Implications for women/girls’ empowerment and education. In Soshanguve Paremiology: A multilingual
  Approach (UNISA Press).

• Mushonga, M. & Mushonga, S. 2025. Decolonisation and decoloniality of the 21st century: An Antidote for Elusive (Community) Development?” In Grey Magaiza & Margie Maistry (eds.), Community Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, Routledge. ISBN. 9781032763835.

• Moruri, P. & Mushonga, M. 2025. Traversing and embracing multiples identities: Ulwaluko and the gay community among the Xhosa in Mthatha”, African Identities.

Decoloniallity (power, knowledge/epistemology, being, theory, praxis)

Africa(n) studies/African history (race, class, ethnicity, oral history, oral traditions)

Higher education studies (funding, university systems, community relations)

Postcoloniality (power, agency, hybridity, resistance)

Gender studies (gender-based violence, feminism, decolonial feminism)

ASHW6806 Africa and the Decolonial World 

GSHD6806 Gender and Decolonisation (BA Honours in Gender Studies)

GSME Gender and Environment (MA in Gender Studies)